What drives the cost of an SEO and AEO audit?
Short answer
Templates, not URLs
A five-million-page ecommerce catalogue built on six templates is a smaller audit than a two-hundred-page site where every page was hand-built. Crawl scale affects the tooling cost, which is minor. Template count affects the analysis, which is the actual work.
When scoping, the useful question is not how many pages you have. It is how many genuinely different page types a model would encounter.
Rendering architecture
A server-rendered site can be diagnosed against what agents actually receive. A client-side rendered application needs the comparison run twice, once as a browser and once as a plain fetch, across every template, and the findings then have to be translated into an engineering plan rather than a content plan.
This single variable can double an audit. It is also frequently where the entire problem turns out to live.
Markets and languages
Each additional market adds an entity graph, a competitive set, a set of retrieval behaviours and usually a hreflang surface. Multi-market work does not scale linearly, because the failure modes differ per market rather than repeating.
Data access
Server logs, Search Console and analytics access make an audit faster, cheaper and substantially more defensible. Without logs, crawler behaviour has to be inferred rather than observed, and inference is slower and weaker. Clients who can grant access get a better report for less.
Where the engagement stops
A findings-only audit ends with a prioritised report your team implements. An audit with remediation continues into the build. The second is more expensive and usually cheaper overall, because the person who found the problem is the one fixing it.
How pricing works here
Every engagement is quoted individually in euros against the scope above. There is no rate card, no subscription and no default retainer, because a published number would either overcharge the simple cases or underprice the hard ones.
A brief describing your situation gets a scoped proposal with a fixed price and a delivery window within 24 hours.
Next step
Send the problem. Get a scoped proposal.
Within 24 hours you get a proposal with a fixed scope and a delivery window, or a note saying this is not the right practice for it. Quoted per engagement in euros. No subscription, no default retainer.